This rock, rolled onto the beach from the last glacial age is part of the moraine that was swept by the glacier from the height of land that remains behind the beach. It is called seal rock because when the tide is high the seals have used it for birthing. The pianist watched a mother seal after the birthing process, drop the emerging baby in the water from the rock and then wait while it had to swim and climb back to the mother. When the tide is low and the rock is dry it is a climbing rock for the kids. It seems here it also serves as a meditating rock for someone whose thoughts are going back to thirty summers. Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.

There is an old joke. It may have come from Socrates though it is not recorded as his. Student: "Why do you always answer a question with a question?"Teacher: "What's wrong with a question?" Indeed! Answer that student because it is hellish complex.

Socrates, as Plato records him, asked questions of students as a means of eliciting thought rather than making didactic statements. It may have been slow and painful and often seemed silly, but it allowed thinking for oneself. The students answer may well lead to a further question in which Socrates often feigned ignorance.

Have we worshiped the accumulation of fact that trumps question and thought, and will question and thought sometimes expose the nakedness of "known" fact? I had two teachers in my lifetime that took the time to employ Socratic methods. They were confusing, exasperating, exposed our ignorance, but were never arbitrary, in thrall of unquestioned facts or spent all of the time thinking inside the box. It took me fifty years to realize it was no joke to question all : there is nothing wrong with a question; and it still is remarkably easy to be wrong.

The name, a derivative of the den, but a somewhat darker and more mysterious connotation, removed from the light and airy regions of the house such as the room designated for living or dining, sleeping or washing and storing your pills. There is something primitive about a cave, something that a self proclaimed esoteric, eclectic, would not care to call his room. I suppose one could call it an office or library but that is too fancy for an under-employed so I call it my room. Names are important in that they signify identity. "My room" is neutral. The room may contain the paraphernalia of tributes, the cacophony of attributes, honors, medals and cups with engraving but there is nothing there but old information and it is too dark for anything but hibernation. It implies the need for protection which no longer exists. The industrial room called the kitchen has the supreme role of the continuing provision of life, The solitary life of the cave dweller looks to exclusion and inhibition and advancing into the light of the airy living, blinking in the sunshine, engaging the pianist, does allow the new dispensation to chuck the past, praise the present and look to the future. Man cave as a term is a stupidity forced on a hapless man stereotyped into some sort of a hairy brute without anima and therefore convinced that he should like a cave. Spend your time in the living room and not the museum of life lived and room alone.

When the epic journey by water from Turkey to Greece which recently occurred by those who chose to brave elements, the price was first paid and recorded in history of Odysseus who went from Troy to Ithaca, much the same journey; probably embarked in 1188 BCE and arrived ten years later in 1178 BCE. Whether myth, parable, fable, allegory or metaphor, those truths are always interior and become exterior only for whoever wishes to brave elements, within as without, and challenges the elements that rule our universe. The incredible sadness and unfairness for the journey by refugees is compounded by loss of home, wandering, loss of identity, despair, and a sense of abandonment by God. As Homer described the journey over the ten years after the Trojan war that noble Odysseus took, the deaths and sadness, abandoned and rebuffed by his gods, included wandering, loss of identity, despair. But he succeeded by cunning and Athene who was always with him. He never lost the interior truth that man is part of gods or God. We are told; we who are Christians; that we are made in the image of God.( Genesis 1 , 26 27) . The Greeks, (actually the Achaeans) made their gods in the image of man. Their gods had all the foibles which we possess. The Christian God is said to be omnipotent, but God or gods can't abandon us for we are already part of them portrayed in what we know as our interior truth. The Greeks cheerfully anthropomorphized their Gods in the image of mankind. We can never anthromorphize our God because he has anthromophized us, Michelangelo notwithstanding.